Interesting story. I noted a couple of telling passages (from a design/prototype/deployment perspective):
"I did what you're always told to do as a young entrepreneur," Abrams says. "I brought on experienced investors to help Friendster fulfill its potential. But the all-star team was the curse of death." "The growth presented immediate engineering headaches. ... By late 2003, load times regularly clocked in at over a minute and users were beginning to complain in blogs and forums. ... The problem might have been solved if someone had reworked the software to ignore distant connections--for example, by calculating only connections between friends. But Friendster's engineers were so preoccupied with day-to-day slowdowns that they neglected to step back and ask what was causing them. "This time, he plans to favor quick and dirty engineering solutions over the elegant but not necessarily practical ideas that were imposed by Friendster's management." The most critical issues appear to have involved paying attention to the social context of the technical solution plus the need to rapidly prototype and test, learning and modifying the design as you go, rather than waste an undue amount of time building grand initial plans divorced from reality. -mn. On 11/26/07, Mike Scarpiello <[EMAIL PROTECTED] > wrote: > > This is a little long, but a really great analysis of the first social > networking site - > > http://tinyurl.com/2k86l9 > ________________________________________________________________ > -- Murli Nagasundaram, Ph.D. http://www.murli.com [EMAIL PROTECTED] +91 99 02 69 69 20 ________________________________________________________________ *Come to IxDA Interaction08 | Savannah* February 8-10, 2008 in Savannah, GA, USA Register today: http://interaction08.ixda.org/ ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
